John C. Greene

John Colton Greene (March 5, 1917, Indianapolis, Indiana – November 12, 2008, Pacific Grove, California) was an American historian of science. He is known for his influential study of the history of evolutionary thought, The Death of Adam, for academic controversies with Neo-Darwinians, particularly Ernst Mayr, collected in Debating Darwin, and for his studies of early American science, particularly American Science in the Age of Jefferson.

Biography His father was a professor at Butler College, Indiana at his birth, then moved to University of South Dakota in 1919. John C. Greene grew up in Vermillion, South Dakota, where he graduated in 1934 from Vermillion High School. He graduated in 1938 with a B.A. from the University of South Dakota. In 1939 he graduated with an M.A. in American history from Harvard University and continued studying there for his Ph.D. until 1942, becoming one of the early Junior Fellows of the Harvard Society of Fellows in 1941, when his academic career was interrupted by World War II. He was drafted into the US Army in 1942, and served from September 1942 to April 1946, travelling to five continents and attaining the rank of captain. While stationed in Teheran, he, as a first lieutenant, met Ellen Wiemann (1917–1998), a Red Cross nurse from Larchmont, New York. They married in Cairo, Egypt in November 1945. The couple lived from 1948 to 1967 in various Midwestern university towns with one academic year (1962–1963) in Berkeley, California. During the years from 1948 to 1967, they raised three children, Ruth, Ned, and John David. John C. Greene taught from 1948 to 1952 as an instructor at the University of Chicago, from 1952 to 1956 at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, from 1956 to 1962 at Iowa State University, from 1962 to 1963 as a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and from 1963 to 1967 as a professor at the University of Kansas. He was in 1974 a visiting scholar at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge and in 1978 a visiting historian at the National Museum of History and Technology, Smithsonian Institution. He was from 1975 to 1976 the president of the History of Science Society. In 1983 he was elected a fellow of the American Antiquarian Society. In 1989 a festschrift of essays was dedicated to him, History, Humanity, and Evolution edited by James Moore. In 2002 he received the George Sarton Medal.

Selected publications Articles

Books

with John G. Burke,